The human brain is a complex machine, but unlike any man-made machine, it is self-aware. Whilst it is understood that people can trick each other into believing something that the tricker understands to be false, it is difficult to imagine cheating your self-aware brain yourself. If your brain formulated the trick, then it would surely be totally aware of being tricked. Here are a couple of illusions you can play on your brain which work, despite this logic.
The first is the Ganzfeld Procedure which involves turning your radio to a station of static. Lie on your back and tape a pair of halved table tennis balls over your eyes, one half over each eye. After a while you should begin to experience strange sensory distortions. Some people see things, others hear voices. Once your senses are blocked, your brain craves stimulation and begins to invent it’s own. The second experiment allows you to cause any physical pain to “shrink”. By viewing a sore body part, such as a finger through a pair of inverted binoculars, researchers have found that test subjects felt significantly less pain as the painful body part appeared further away, and disconnected. The Rubber Hand Illusion involves hiding your arm under a box on a table, then setting a realistic rubber arm on the same table so that from your point of view it could be your real hidden arm. If you get a friend to stroke both your hidden hand and the fake hand in the same places at the same time, you should start to feel as if the fake limb is your own. Next, the Pinocchio Illusion requires you to sit behind a friend, facing their back, whilst wearing a blindfold. You should then stroke both your nose and the nose of your friend and after about a minute some people start to feel as if their nose is incredibly long. Finally, the Purkinje Lights is a very simple experiment you can play on yourself. Purkinje found that if you close your eyes, tilt your head to face the sun then quickly move your hand back and forth infront of your closed eyes, after a few seconds you should start to see strange patterns.